1,918 karma · joined July 31, 2026
“Because why? Got any salt?”
“Because all the available surface metals and coal have already been mined,” said Crake.
“Without which, no iron age, no bronze age, no age of steel, and all the rest of it. There's more farther down, but the advanced technology we need for extracting those would have been obliterated.”
— Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"
you can reach me at hn.record316@passmail.net :)
I think the only way to do it is to have your neighborhood actively being okay with seeking local services something that a lot of neighborhood groups I frequent seem to be a big fan of (farmer's markets are an indication of this - if there's strong and regular FMs being hosted, there's people willing to burn a little extra disposable income for better, more reliable products)
Checking to see if there are better targets...
Clauding...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack#:~:te...
this is a pedantic misinterpretation of the scope of East Data, West Computing. the hubs are all in tier one cities with the power generation capacity to handle them. each hub is comprised of dozens of data-centers and are the place to build because of large economic incentives, infra guarantees, and university-trained talent living in close proximity
see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...
>This initiative is expected to accommodate up to 95% of China’s digital data needs through this reorganization
>Within a year of implementation, more than 112 new data centers have either been authorized, under construction, or completed across the planned computing hubs
this project itself is the thing that has all the other nation states in the world clutching pearls about not supporting their native AI corporations enough. it's something you and everyone else should really familiarize yourself with because it is one of the major items influencing current realpolitik and economic decisions (and is likely going to be the thing that'll lead us to a thrice-in-a-lifetime sized recession but that's a convo for a different day)
how does this even pass basic design QA in the first place? or modeling simulations? adding a kludgey software solution to a fundamentally broken airplane design is, of course, going to introduce huge amounts of risk
>MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction.
and there it is - the MBA-brained enshittification of everything
> As airplanes became more complex and the gulf between what the FAA could pay and what an aircraft manufacturer could pay grew larger, more and more of those engineers migrated from the public to the private sector. Soon the FAA had no in-house ability to determine if a particular airplane’s design and manufacture were safe. So the FAA said to the airplane manufacturers, “Why don’t you just have your people tell us if your designs are safe?” The airplane manufacturers said, “Sounds good to us.”
you're telling me deregulation (ie removing the lowest bar for standards) leads to worse safety and overall shittier products? incredible
I suspect Boeing will 'learn their lesson from this one' and then less than a decade later, with enough shareholder pressure, fall back on the same sword that it did this time around
a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...
I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
he was writing in reaction to the McCarthy era which, arguably, is very similar to kind of bombastic nativism we're seeing now from our political elites. his argument essentially being that there are cultural and institutionalized forces that are driving people to, well, turn their brains off - specifically to no longer be skeptical of what they consume, to not want to refine and improve their toolbox of analysis, to not want to understand how things work for the sake of knowing
and that these acts were deliberate - a populace is so much easier to control when it's complacent and unknowing, who believes, unskeptically, that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, unquestioning about who was writing the PR missives that feed the news cycle (see also: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda), how verbatim they are, and what the real intent of the authors were
like, I get that you don't want to put in effort for a job you don't like. but that effort also makes you better at your work. it makes it easier on you, it lets you create less incidents, it empowers you to be more agent in your own life, to, who knows, have the guts to start a consulting gig because your skill-sets actually are better than the average
there's so many benefits from just being more diligent, longterm, proactive benefits. but that's not everybody's extrinsic motivator and it's so much easier to just be Skinner-boxed by social media companies into doomscrolling, I suppose
I think until we have actual repeated-use measurements tracked over time (eg consistent prompts used to do the same tasks, count number of hallucinations and errors and bugs over a long period of time) you won't really have any idea of which model is better
I also think of it like a car - some just feel better to drive even if they are materially worse in other measures. until you start measuring the metrics important to you (eg MPG and cost of maintenance over a long period), you have no idea which car is actually better suited for you. and the fact that you can only do so with a limited number of cars (or hours available to work, or money to burn on tokens) means there's no true measure approaching objectivity
I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works
that said, China is also rapidly scaling up coal-fired plants: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-power-plant-carbon-cli...
those presumably support all of the surrounding infrastructure + people + manufacturing so it's not as if it's truly solar-powered. but it's still handily better than the state-by-state abandonment of clean energy goals here in the US - I lay this out a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700743
just a small caution on this anthropomorphism - it implies there's some high-order 'thinking' behind it. in reality, it's probably healthier to see LLMs as a combination of symbolic logic reasoning steps paired with probabilistic token predictor generating the proponents and operators in that chain, all trained by humans on different large data sets
to be 'goal-oriented' implies that there's the capacity to be anything else and I don't think that's how LLMs operate at all. I think they only know how to operate within their design parameters and much of that design is simply much further upstream during the training and post-training processes. that opacity makes it feel like 'intelligence' when you're interacting with it as a downstream product because you'll see an agent act in a way that you didn't command - but that's simply a result of your not being shown all the antecedent mappings and architectural design
something something indistinguishable from magic as that one guy said
that said, my observations have a sample size of like... four couples maybe? (they're indistinguishable from one another now). but the dynamics I saw were four for four which seemed good enough for me at the time to dip out of that scene
can you imagine chucking all of computer science away because Babbage's thinking machines and Lovelace's programming cards didn't really result in meaningful capital gains here in FY26Q3? or, a more realistic example - imagine biology and genetics today if Mendel's discoveries had been published in a more widely read journal, if he hadn't been outright dismissed for his mathematical approach. or Semmelweis' advocacy of antispetic procedures that flew in the face of the then humors-based understanding of medicine in the 1800s - how many lives would have been saved between then and when Germ Theory finally took off decades later?
it's ironic to me that it's often the same people who'll adopt the logic of banning reproductive rights on the off chance that someone very unprepared to have a child might birth someone who can cure cancer in spite of the probabilistic evidence of SES being highly correlated with educational attainment (eg that graph of the income bracket that the parents of all Nobel Prize winners start with). and yet when it comes to the actual nascent research and development required to pave the way for larger discoveries, that's seen as totally pointless and not worthy of funding. it's truly flabbergasting
that it also serves as marketing material for just how capable their models are is just a cherry on top, I suppose
which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders)
those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight)
which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit)
I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence
imagine yourself living in the 1700s. how would you justify Newton and Leibniz's work on calculus?
all maritime engineering and trade was done with geometry and arithmetic at the time. there were no practical applications, not for likely at least a century until hydrodynamics were incorporated into shipbuilding
now look at today. how many of our modern technologies rely on the field having been birthed? that could only exist because of even further decades-worth of antecedent refinements, extrapolations, applications that had, at their time, no direct utilitarian cause?
there's no KPI to be derived from any academic field of study at the bleeding edge of theory. theoretical underpinnings lead to practical applications much further down the line after many paradigm shifts
semiotics and cultural capital as theoretical concepts is another example - at the time they were purely seen as navel-gazey literary theory work. these days, half a century later, they're in wide use (for better or worse) in marketing and advertising - they birthed the whole concept of 'branding'
not everything needs immediate, quantifiable justification. to believe it does indicates a need for a period of self-reflection, to figure out how and when you became so heavily influenced by the MBA-brained propaganda that the world should revolve around the quarter-by-quarter creation of capital
like, ask yourself, in Newton's time, was there much application for calculus? what about today? this is almost universally applicable to all research because even null findings are a map marker of where not-to-look
“In the 1920s, auto groups redefined who owned the city street. It was [originally the] drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”
ie under the banner of "pedestrian safety" that was illustrated by numerous examples of grisly accidents, automobile manufacturing lobbyists pushed jay-walking laws and essentially took all city streets away from pedestrian use, entrenching reliance on cars for transportation and urban design to match
the idea here was to portray cars as inevitable, necessary things that were going to kill people anyway (just like how AI is inevitably going to lead to mass security breaches) and really it's the pedestrian's (or the maintainer's) job to avoid being harmed
the point of these 'disclosures' is AGI branding - wow we have such a dangerous new product, it (consciously, autonomously) escaped confinement!
their whole business is selling capability. and what better advertising than to say that your model is just a little too capable sometimes